too many Daves

From the New York mag piece on Joan Didion and her soon-to-be published book:

Susan Traylor, Quintana’s best friend since nursery school, used to envy the structure of Quintana’s household—but Quintana envied the freedom of Traylor’s. “It used to drive her crazy that her parents were so on top of things,” says Traylor. She remembers warmly one ride to elementary school with Dunne and his daughter. Quintana showed him a paper she was going to turn in. He asked her if she’d given it to him or Didion to proof, and when she said no, he threw it out the window.

My way of being a dad isn’t the only way to be a dad. Obviously.

I won’t know for decades whether my way of being a dad is damaging my kids or helping them grow up to be happy, fulfilled, competent, compassionate people. Still, throwing a kid’s paper out the window because she didn’t get it proofed seems problematic, if only because of the littering.

But it’s an episode the best friend “remembers warmly.” Maybe I’m missing something.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to Woodsy Owl.

Thank you for ordering “Go the F**k to Sleep” by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés. Would you like to pre-order a dozen cases of Cutty Sark and an MP3 of “Cat’s In The Cradle” for delivery on June 29, 2041?

We can probably agree that: 1) It’s too early for Father’s Day gift ideas; 2) It’s reckless of me to decide on page 64 of 180 that Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits will make a terrific Father’s Day gift.

I don’t want to be reckless. So let’s forget Father’s Day. Let’s just look at some of the passages from Abbott Awaits that I read today.

From page 37:

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of small rocks within Abbott’s reach. The girl drops the rock in the grate, smiles when she hears the noise. “More rocks?” she says. A dog barks in some backyard. A cloud covers and then uncovers the sun. Campus is distant and theoretical, like a galaxy or heaven. There is something beyond tedium. You can pass all the way through tedium and come out the other side, and this is Abbott’s gift today.

The entire text of the chapter on page 38:

Abbott would like to think he’s a good guy, and yet his wife is up there sobbing, and he’s down here with the superglue.

From page 28:

A marriage, especially a marriage with children, cannot function properly if both its constituents are in foul temper, thus the Bad Mood is a privilege only one spouse can enjoy at a time. Who gets to be in a Bad Mood? This is the day-to-day struggle.

From page 43:

Amidst the toys in the family room is a battery-operated light-sensitive jungle-animal-sounds puzzle, given to Abbott’s daughter either by a childless friend of Abbott or a friend of Abbott who hates Abbott. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott and his wife clean the family room after putting their daughter to bed. Tonight, like all the nights, when they turn off the light after cleaning they activate a loud light-sensitive jungle-animal sound—an unspecifically savage squawk from the bottom of the puzzle crate. A monkey, perhaps, or parrot. Tonight, like all the nights, the jungle-animal sound is an agonizing surprise, an ambush. Abbott and his wife laugh and say curse words. Shit and fuck, for instance. The imprecations, because they are directed at a puzzle for children ages two to four, seem more vulgar and thus more satisfying.

From page 12:

Abbott’s dog is a sturdy, fit, and handsome yellow Lab that just might be, pound for pound, God’s most timorous creation. The dog has always been terribly afraid of thunder, fireworks, and backfiring engines, but the scope and intensity of his fear have increased as he has aged. At eleven, he now fears airplanes, garbage trucks, delivery vans, other dogs, cats, people, loud birds and bugs, scarecrows, snowmen, kites and flags, some trees, heavy rain, light rain, fog, cloudy skies, partly cloudy skies, gusts of wind, refreshing summer breezes. Also, he seems scared of what can most accurately be described as nothing.

From pages 61 and 62:

This morning Abbott is sitting on his back deck having coffee and reading the newspaper with Ted, Margot, Oliver, Vince, and Chester, who are all imaginary people. … Margot is laughing. She has her head tilted back and her mouth open with her buck teeth pointed upward as if to take a big bite out of the sky. She is gorgeous and buzzing. She pats Abbott on the forearm and says, “You just made my day.” Abbott has a gigantic crush on Margot. If he were not married to a real woman and if he did not have dried applesauce on his neck and if Margot were not always off backpacking through terrifying countries, he thinks he might propose to her this instant.

From page 54:

It’s late and still awfully hot when Abbott discovers, on the Internet, a petition to prohibit the painting of hermit crab shells. The petition is beautiful, Abbott understands, precisely because it is futile. He suspects that he would not like to be in the same room with any of these 298 dissenters, but he loves them virtually and from afar.

From page 52 and 53:

What he’s doing is cleaning vomited raspberries out of his daughter’s car seat with antibacterial moist wipes. He is reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to clean out the dirty stables. He is trying not to be reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to perform the same bad job over and over. … Abbott’s sweat drips down into the vomit, and he arrives again in paradox. The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.

I guess it’s worth pointing out that this has not been a copy-and-paste job. I’ve got the open paperback pinned down with an empty drinking glass. There’s joy in typing out Bachelder’s words, whether they’re in Abbott Awaits or in the other stuff I’ve read by him. I’m so happy to not even be halfway done with this novel.

Immediately after finishing Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence earlier this month, I wrote that the novel “kind of wrecked me.” Setting aside whether a person can be wrecked in a “kind of” kind of way, I’m glad to say that I’ve found a way to be much less wrecked.

Let’s pause. If you haven’t read The Age of Innocence, go read it. I hope it won’t seem defeatist so early in the writing of this post for me to predict — with total certainty — that you will like Wharton’s novel better than whatever I end up writing here.

Here, in as basic a form as I can manage, is why I’m feeling less wrecked: I’m a dad.

Newland Archer, the man at the center of The Age of Innocence, is a dad. Because of an unplanned pregnancy, he stays in a marriage he wants to flee. Meanwhile, he lets himself become marooned and remote,  stranded in the imagined life he wished for with Ellen, his wife’s cousin:

… (He) built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

Yet, by the end of the novel, that unplanned pregnancy has become a grownup son named Dallas. Of Dallas and Newland, Wharton writes “the two were born comrades.” So Dallas — now engaged to marry Fanny Beaufort — wants Newland to join him for a father-son trip to France, and Newland — now a widower — decides to “seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.”

They go.

In Paris, Wharton shows readers that Dallas possesses precisely the sort of bluntness that Newland would have needed to change his own life. Here’s the exchange when Dallas tells a frazzled Newland that he’s arranged for them to call on Ellen, the (ostensibly secret) love of Newland’s life:

“You told her I was here?”

“Of course—why not?” Dallas’s eye brows went up whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father’s with a confidential pressure.

“I say, father: what was she like?”

Archer felt his colour rise under his son’s unabashed gaze. “Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren’t you? Wasn’t she most awfully lovely?”

“Lovely? I don’t know. She was different.”

“Ah—there you have it! That’s what it always comes to, doesn’t it? When she comes, SHE’S DIFFERENT—and one doesn’t know why. It’s exactly what I feel about Fanny.”

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. “About Fanny? But, my dear fellow—I should hope so! Only I don’t see—”

“Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric! Wasn’t she—once—your Fanny?”

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. “What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ‘em out,” he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

“My Fanny?”

“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything for: only you didn’t,” continued his surprising son.

“I didn’t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said—”

“Your mother?”

“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: “She never asked me.”

“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.—I say, Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s. I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”

Dallas, then, is Newland’s escape from that “deaf-and-dumb asylum.” Newland — no matter how the book ends and how that ending wrecked me — is lucky to have Dallas. I mean, lucky doesn’t even cover it. Here’s a man who’s spent his whole life being untrue to himself and inauthentic with the people around him, and he gets to have a child who cares enough to be real with him. Yes, Dallas is about to get married. But “Fanny Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to interfere with their intimacy. On the contrary, from what he had seen of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it.”

Lucky. Lucky lucky lucky. Lucky!

Whatever tragedy there may be in Newland not ending up with Ellen, it’s clear to me that the greatest tragedy would be him not ending up with Dallas.

I felt an echo of all this tonight in a couple of sentences from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad:

Lou put his arm around Rolph. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world with the power to soothe him.